Jane Elliott - Origin of Workplace Diversity Training

Origin of Workplace Diversity Training

Jane Elliott is considered to be the “foremother” of diversity training, with the blue-eyed/brown-eyed scenario as the basis of much of what is called diversity training. She has done such training for corporations like General Electric, Exxon, AT&T, and IBM, as well as lectured to the FBI, IRS, US Navy, US Department of Education and US Postal Service.

As Elliott began to do workshops and other training based on her exercise to organizations outside of her school system, the Riceville school system granted her unpaid leave to do this. However, the increasing demands to be away from the classroom eventually caused problems with her public school teaching career. Elliott left teaching in the mid 1980s to devote herself full time to corporate training. Her standard fee since then has been at least $6,000 per day for companies and governmental institutions.

The exercise that Elliott developed for her classroom was redeveloped for the corporate world. The exercise was promoted positively as a way to promote teamwork, profits and “winning together”. On the negative side, it was claimed that not doing such diversity training could make these same companies open to bad publicity, boycotts and lawsuits.

Companies found the idea of offering such training attractive, not only because in the 1970s and 1980s there were increasing numbers of people of color in their organizations, but also because of U.S. court rulings and federal policies to promote multiculturalism brought about by pressure from civil rights groups during the same two decades.

These policies and rulings primarily dealt with “hostile work environments" such as; the Supreme Court of the United States’s 1986 ruling in Meritor Savings Bank v. Vinson where employers were accused of tolerating between groups of employees; and the notion of “disparate impact” (established in the 1970s by Griggs v. Duke Power Co.) that could hold a company liable for practices that resulted in unequal outcomes even if it was not the company’s intention. Other lawsuits of these two types had been realized against companies like Texaco, CocaCola, Denny's, Chevy Chase Bank, Sodexho and Abercrombie & Fitch. In most of these cases, the judgment went against these companies resulting in the payment of compensation and the implementation of some kind of monitored diversity plan. Elliott herself offered Denny’s as an example of how racism leads to costs via lawsuits. She claimed that Denny’s had to pay US$46 million for one suit but still had an incident later where a group of black children were not waited on, and so predicated another suit for the restaurant chain.

Many companies at that time came to see diversity training as a way to ward off negative legal action and publicity. Elliott said, “If you can’t think of any other reason for getting rid of racism, think of it as a real money saver.” In fact, by the 1980s many corporations had started to accept much of what diversity training proposed to do, adopting role-playing exercises and terms such as “inclusion”, “mutual learning”, “and “winning together”. By 1994, there were 5,000 diversity trainers in the United States. In 2004, Coca Cola CEO E. Neville Isdell asked a court to extend federal supervision of its diversity policy citing such oversight as a valuable resource. The rationale given for this acceptance is that it not only helps with complying with US federal law but helps profits by reducing employee turnover and increasing market reach.

Diversity training based on Elliott’s methods has been mandated by colleges and universities such as Wake Forest University and Johns Hopkins University. Often these are required after incidents such as the Halloween party invitations done by the Sigma Chi fraternity chapter at Johns Hopkins which were accused of being racially offensive.

Elliott-inspired diversity training has been realized outside the United States as well. Diversity training was little-known in the United Kingdom at the beginning of the 1990s; however when The Race Relations Amendment Act 2000 passed in the United Kingdom, it listed 100 diversity training firms in the Diversity Directory. According to a survey by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, 70% of firms have diversity policies in which diversity training plays a major role. Many of these courses are designed to have a “lighter touch” than Elliott’s approach, but those based solidly on Elliott’s model are also promoted. Elliott has personally held workshops in Australia, focusing on racial issues brought up by Pauline Hanson and the lack of acknowledgment of contributions made by aborigines in that country. Jane Elliott sells videos and other materials to be used by diversity trainers on her website.